Category Archives: Selection Box

Experts say that moving house can be almost as stressful as moving house.

The majority of you have probably polished off your selection boxes sometime mid-last week (leaving the Jelly Tots as a slightly crap last treat if you’re anything like me. Do they still even do Jelly Tots? Who cares, it has nothing to do with this, press on…) but for some of us a Selection Box, like a dog, is for life and not just for Christmas. Not that I have a dog. I didn’t get a choccie selection box either, but that is by the by.

My Selection Box has been a midnight feast for the past five and a half years, but as from this week any late night gorging will come to an end and will instead be taken with a post-meal coffee. In other words, and to stop talking in tortured metaphors at last, Selection Box is now set to be primetime fare as it moves to its new slot at 9pm on Wednesdays. The glamour. For those of you loathe to replace the sultry tones of BCB’s resident five tissue fantasy Laura Rawlings for that of an utter divot, Laura’s commitments with a high-fallutin’ rival broadcaster have sadly taken her time away from these shores somewhat, though her BCB Sessions show will still be a going concern once a month on a Sunday, starting on 20 January.

And lo, did I feel the bearded hand of Uncle Travelling Albert on my shoulder, informing me that he was returning from his global jaunt and that my stint in the coveted Electic Mainline chair (a decorative castered sedan with attachable caviar tray) was in its last throes.

Sadly, due to a misunderstanding between himself and a helmeted law enforcement officer regarding a holed-out turnip, a pair of malfunctioning trousers, a series of primal yelps and the back seat of an omnibus, Phil Cope was unable to co-present with me once more and the show progressed as a Thornton-only concern. Contributions to his bail should be sent in the form of cash directly to me in a brown paper envelope and without out a word to the Inland Revenue.

Still, despite the dearth of Cope’s lovely Pontefract brogue there were plenty of terpsichorean treats to fill the programme. Here be the monikers what be done gone given to them as rudimentary identifiers, and meanwhile I’ll scuttle back off to my Midnight griefhole with a chair made out of razorwire. Thanks for having me.

Imagine, if you will, the effect on your body and mind from having spent several weeks slaving away at the coal face of public service broadcasting having to work for a whole two hours every week. Â Well, look upon my exhausted face and see such a reality, for having recorded my own show I have also been sitting in for Albert Freeman on Eclectic Mainline. Â So yes, that’s not one hour per week but two – you’d barely think that such a feat of human endurance was possible but I am living proof that with proper application and a back-up stock of biscuits a man can push his corporeal essence to the very limits. Â It knocks that John Bishop bloke’s efforts into a tilted titfer, I think you’d agree.

Anyroad around, this week’s featured record comes from My New Favourite Band for this week Those Darlins who are a four-piece from Tennessee who have the knack not only of making smashing three minute guitar pop records but also looking ruddy great. Â Here’s the second track from their new album Screws Get Loose entitled Your Bro which has lyrics to die for. Â Not literally, obviously. Â No one should ever die for a lyric. Â Unless it’s as punishment for Des’Ree. I’d rather have a piece of toast.

When Albert Freeman proferred his chair to myself and Phil Cope (one sat on the other’s knee since you ask) he did so with the promise that we would ensure that his commitment to a weekly blog about his show would also follow. Â What Albert foolishly failed to check was whether myself and The Mod Oliver Hardy were in fact hiding cross keys behind our backs, which as everyone knows is the legally-binding get-out clause for any promise made publically or privately and is sadly a manouevre often abused at weddings by men intent from the start on being serial adulterers.

So, I have welched on this agreement made betwixt Freeman, Hardy & wally and thus have to use one blog entry to catch up on two editions of Eclectic Mainline. Â The first saw Cope & I playing catch with such political hot potatoes as Adele’s sac of living tissue in which she nurtures her young Brit Award eggs, the appropraicy of Paul Weller’s tie knot and the manner in which a radio wireless show can disobey the rules of the space/time continuum. Â In summary: we titted about again.

Ding dong Dingle, where chair?

Sadly, such titting was reduced to a solo practice for last week’s show and Mod Laurel was forced to go it alone as, due to the constraints of that there time that they have these days, Phil was unable to join me. Â You may think that recording an hour of radio together per week is not that restrictive in terms of the ticky tick tock of clocks, but if you are thinking this it just goes to show what a wretched and naive specimen you are. Â You are clearly failing to take into account the work that goes into ensuring that our voices are being pushed out of radios, computer speakers, iPods, phones and various other devices accross the World simultaneously. Â Everyone says that Father Christmas is amazing for managing to get around every household in the World in a single night once a year, and yet we manage to be inside thousands of radio machines all at the same time, wittering nonsense about hair dos and Cain Dingle off of out of Emmerdale Farm. Â You don’t get that without at least half an hour’s preparation time, I’ll tell you now.

Anyway, here’s the track-listing, brought to you via the twin media of the written word and contemporary dance, although only one is visible here:

Your regular EM host Albert Freeman is off for a few weeks on a mission to save stranded vegan wasps from a concentration camp in deepest Antasia, so myself and the venerable Phil Cope – the Mod Laurel & Hardy – are sitting in for a total of four weeks in return for lurid bodily favours which would make a street girl vomit into an ashtray.

I seem to recall an off-air agreement betwixt your hosts that if I did all the technical hoohah this week, Phillip would do the blogging honours. Ah cannae see the relevant entry*, so I’ve done the honours on his behalf and will make sure to smash all the teeth out of his head as a punishment for reneging on such a deal. It also gives me carte blanche to shove up these compare & contrast images of the two of us – coincedentally taken entirely independent of each other and without prior knowledge of the existence of either, which Phil hates as he thinks it makes him look like a blind Womble.

* Although, in fairness, I took home the tracklisting which might have made it difficult for him, but I must just smash his teeth out anyway for my own amusement.

Here’s the tunes that we poured onto the airwaves like aural soup into your listening ear bowls:

Aons ago, I introduced a feature of sorts onto these blog entires wherein I would pick a song what I done gone played via the magic of the wireless airwaves right into your ear crannies and have it as a featured track right here on that there internet so you can read all abaaaaht it.Â So I thunks I’ll do that again.

This week’s comes courtesy of Wirral warbler Liz Green’s debut album O, Devotion! which has, as the inner sleevenotes admit, had something of an elongated gestation period.Â However, some things require you not to rush (and where music is concerned it requires, where possible, for you not to be Rush as well) and the result is a rather bewitching record of haunting guitar plucking and a vocal performance which sounds like it belongs on an undiscovered early 20th century 78rpm slab of acetate.Â Which I say as a very very good thing, lest there be confusion. Continue reading →

…Suddenly a door blows open.Â Framed in silouette in the doorframe is a tall slim figure standing against the wintery elements.

Beat.

The figure steps forward slowly into the room. Â The shadows cast across his face gradually diminish as the light trickles across his face. Â The tips of his mouth form into a smile.

Evening.

Don’t pretend you didn’t notice that I’ve been away because you did.Â For various reasons not worth exploring I hadn’t been able to do a show for several weeks at the end of 2011, and I’ve been missing from this blog for a disgracefully long period.Â Sadly technical problems meant that the annual Christmas Selection Box had to be abandoned half way through recording (I actually had our Broadcast Manager standing over me ringing the helpdesk between tracks), so bat-eared listeners may have spotted that the festive show that was jizzed out onto the airwaves on Boxing Day was a repeat of the Christmas show from 2009. Â Big thanks to BCB’s shaggy-haired mound of 70s coat attired loveliness Dan Carroll for his sterling work in crowbarring this old show into the schedules with little help from your truly. Â I kiss his face.

Anyone wanting to read a playlist of the all the shows that are missing from this blog since my last entry will, I’m afraid, have to go and whistle.Â Or at the very least send an e-mail into the show requesting a playlist for a specific show.Â Any chance of me catching up are around the same as The Goodies’ trandem getting onto the back wheel of Mark Cavendish. Â The only excuse I can give is that David Bowie ate my homework.

Thin white dick.

Ah yes, Mr Bowie. Â The Iguana of The Aleatory as he is known, due to his many changing faces and sounds. Â Who could forget his alters ego porcine pop star Piggy Starthrust, French chanteur A Lad In The Seine, the robotic tennis player unfailingly knocked out in the semi finals every year Tim Machine and possibly my favourite moniker, The Thin White Duck which saw our hero covered in down and pretending to be a neo-Nazi Anatidae.

Selection Box Show 207 was an unashamed cranial tilt to the birthday boy David Robert Jones who turned 65 years of age on 8 January andÂ turned into David Bowie a significant period before that.

Four Bowie tracks were scattered about the show like genius seeds, and were picked for no particular reason other thanÂ because these were the ones I fancied hearing this time around. Â Itâ€™s myÂ show I can do what I like and to hell with what you think you might want to listenÂ to. Â You’d probably choose the gurning Mick Jagger duet, wouldn’t you. Â Youâ€™ll like what youâ€™re told to by me and thatâ€™s an end to it.

So it might be a meaningless numerical milestone, but it’s nice now and again to celebrate the life of an artist and Iâ€™d put forwardÂ the argument that Bowie could arguably be labeled as greatest artist of the 20thÂ Century â€“ and when I say artist I donâ€™t just mean as a musician but across all ofÂ the arts. Â So shove that in your misogynist pipe and smoke it, Mr Picasso.

My physiotherapist told me to do that as well. He failed to supply the outfit, mind.

I would argue that music is the most important art form there is in spite of, or indeed because it is so easily dispensable.Â The advent of portable music players and latterly file sharing, You Tube, Spotify and their ilk has meant that music is an artform we indulge in lazily and is a part of of our everyday lives.Â We metaphorically have music on tap and thus take it for granted, just as we literally have water on tap yet we’re blase about the resource which is most crucial to our survival.Â Even the people who claim not to be particularly interested in music and steadfastly resist the onslaught of Ian Apple and his Pod revolution will hear music on the radio – free at point of access remember – and piped into shopping centres, sports grounds and at the dentists (dentists, regardless of age, colour or creed always listen to Radio 2 whilst they work. Â It’s a law of nature or something [there's also a high rate of suicide among dentists, which is certainly something I'd consider if I listened to Steve Wright five days a week]).

Music is therefore not only accessible in terms of its ease of supply – you can get it with ludicrous ease – it is also more accessible than any other artform in the cerebral sense as well (and I say this with all due deference to the deaf) in that music bypasses our intellectual barriers or indeed lack of them. Â Our reactions to music are largely arbitrary, reactive and perhaps most importantly are formed largely without the need for learned or knowing discourse on the form. Â We do not even need to understand the language that its performers are communicating to us in – I don’t need to speak French to know that I love the songs of Jacques Brel, Francoise Hardy, Serge Gainsbourg and artists such Sigur Ros and the glorious Cocteau Twins have recorded songs in invented languages which are understood only by them.

And Bowie has produced some of the most significant andÂ influential works of art within that field. Â It’d be naive to suggest that he has not borrowed from other artists’ ideas and influences, but this is precisely what a truly great artist should seek to do – to be open and recognise new ideas and challenge themselves to find expression in new directions – and there’s barely a major musical genre which Bowie has not dabbled in with some gusto (although we’re overdue a rockabilly period, which would be rather intriguing). Â His commitment to alter egos, differing musical styles, cut & paste writing techniques and painted faces & changing haircuts have served to form our understanding and power of the combined forces of sound & vision as the metaphorical brush strokes of the rock star idiom. Â The bredth and scope of his output from around 1969 – 1980 in particular demonstrates a creative and inventive force stronger than pretty much any other artist you care to name. Â What’s more, following this he even had the good grace to dip his toe in the genre of Shit Music, which he splashed about in for pretty much entire decade. Â How thoroughly decent of him.

Bowie at Glastonbury 2000

As a postscript, which further bludgeons the point about the disposable nature of music, I recall only too clearly watching Bowie’s headline set at Glastonbury 2000 (from the confines of my front room rather than in a field in Somerset – although considering where I lived at the time being knee-deep in cow shit was probably significantly less hazardous to a person’s health than curling up on our sofa) and being incensed at the manner in which the television coverage continually flicked away to show us, well, something else. Â As the century had changed, here was the greatest artist of the previous 100 years finally showing off “the hits” – some of his finest works that he had kept under the sheets in live terms for many many years – and yet apparently it was appropriate to only dip into this in dispatches because it was vital that we got to see a bit of Basement Jaxx. Â I have nothing against Basement Jaxx in particular, but I recall thinking that we would never visit a Salvador Dali exhibition only to be ushered into a side room after a couple of paintings in order to look at a Rolf Harris kangaroo drawing.

I appear to have gone missing in action from here in recent weeks, which is slightly less preferable than going missing in Acton. I know of at least one really nice pub in Acton, so I could probably find that after a quick search and make my way to a Tube station from there. There are no decent pubs on the internet.

This is all a meaningless pre-amble into the dullardry of three playlists, with the shows available on BCB’s Listen Again feature.

Yes, yes, I know that this new numbering system is not sequential. I did go to school, as demonstrated by the fact that words like “sequential” pour out of my fingers without so much as a pause to blow my nose. Simple counting is not something which I find a major problem – though don’t ask me to help with your algebra homework because you’ll be given short shrift. And I’ve forgotten how to do it anyway (though from memory, I recall it was surprisingly easy).

Time, however, is something I seem to have appalling problems with, and once again the weeks have slipped past and I am even further behind than I was previously. Luckily, the teething troubles that have been preventing Selection Box from appearing on BCB’s new Listen Again feature now appear to be ironed out, and you can now listen to this week’s show again here. A pincer movement from either end will therefore help us to get back up to date, so here’s two shows as yet uploaded to the blog brought to you by the loveliness of Soundcloud, starting with a seasonal “treat” from December which also features that there Albert Freeman. Merry Christmas.

I was informed this week of the exciting news that BCB has gone live with a Listen Again feature, which should make things a bit easier in terms of blogging, and it will now mean yet another way that you can decide not to listen to my programme.

However, due to a slight teething problem, Selection Box is currently missing form the Listen Again list, and as they only remain for a month and I am still over a month behind on playlists I’ll not use a link to the Listen Again feature just yet as I continue the catch up.

Courtesy of these lovely Soundcloud players you can listen to these shows again for a limited period (probably about the length of time it will take to stop vomiting after watching that Paul Whitehouse as a ghost advert). Sadly due to copyright and such blah the show cannot be made available as a downloadable file.